989: Training Your Brain for Maximum Efficiency with Dr. Mithu Storoni

Pete Mockaitis
Mithu, welcome.

Mithu Storoni
Hi. Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
I am excited to chat about becoming hyper-efficient. And I’m imagining, well, it’s in London where you are, so it’s been a few hours in the day. Have you hyper-efficiently already taking care of tons of tasks today, Mithu?

Mithu Storoni
I’ve tried to be as hyper-efficient as I can. Every day is a different one. If you have a different kind of day, depending on the kind of day you have, it’s all about tailoring your tasks and fitting them around your own rhythm. So, every day I do different things, and so every day I have a certain different timetable.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I’m so intrigued to hear about that, and I understand that’s one of your core theses here, is we want to align our work with our natural rhythms of our brain as opposed to trying to contort ourselves to what is externally imposed upon us. Is that a fair synopsis?

Mithu Storoni
That’s absolutely fair. And if you want a little bit of background, so I wrote the book when I realized how the way we work today is very much a hangover from the era of assembly lines. So, when we had the Industrial Revolution quite a long time ago, we had assembly lines, we were producing quantities of things, of refrigerators, of cars, of hair dryers. And during that time, the number of items you produced decided how productive you were, and the longer you stayed on the assembly line, the more productive you were, because the more items you assembled.

When we then had the shift into knowledge work, post-Second World War, around the 1950s, where the majority of the work became office work, became sort of what we used to call white-collar, we actually changed the work but we didn’t change the way we did the work. So, our work hours, the way we measured work, continued in pretty much the same way. We still looked at how many hours we were sitting on the seat, we get paid on overtime, productivity is all about targets.

We then had another shift, which is the kind of shift we still have now, where we started producing intangible goods rather than tangible refrigerators. And so, when intangible goods, such as a software solution, such as other solutions, ideas, it created the bottom line, so they become principle. The principle thing you try to make a difference to your company, to your organization, you need to think about the quality, not the quantity.

So, it no longer matters how many software solutions you manufacture, or how many software solutions you think of, or how many ideas you think of, you could have a thousand mediocre ideas, they will be just as unproductive as having one mediocre idea. We now need to shift to thinking extremely well, so producing one exceptional quality solution, exceptionally creative idea, rather than a hundred bad ones.

In order to do that, the brain can no longer sit and work continuously as if it were producing, or assembling its idea parts on an assembly line. How long you sit on your chair and the way you sit influences how well your mind performs. But we have created a template around that, which is a hangover from the past.

Now we have technology doing all the monotonous, the routine, the sort of quantity-heavy jobs aspects of knowledge work, so now we need to be even better at creating ideas, at forming solutions. And in order to do that, we need to change the way we work in a radically different way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. That all seems to check out in terms of the way the world used to work and the way things are working currently. I’m curious, when it comes to us working at our finest to come up with these exceptional ideas and solutions, is there anything really striking or surprising you’ve discovered about what holds us back and what unleashes us to this greatness?

Mithu Storoni
Yes. So, I approached this subject from my background, which is in neuro-ophthalmology and neuroscience, and I’m very aware of the very, very exciting research field at the moment, looking at the brain’s dynamics. What we know is that the brain is a complex system, it changes state, and there is a network in the brain called the locus coeruleus norepinephrine network, which influences how alert you are, it influences how you pay attention. That’s one angle of the story.

We have uncovered quite a lot of data about this network and how the faster it fires, the more alert, the more sort of wired you become; the slower it fires, the calmer you become. If you take that, I’m diluting it a little bit, but if you take that you add in the cholinergic network, you add in the dopaminergic network, you know, you create the whole map. You realize that when you are performing mental work, knowledge work of any kind, your brain has to be, or your mind has to be, in a certain configuration in order to perform one particular type of task particularly well.

So, for instance, let’s take two examples of knowledge work. Let’s take creative idea generation and let’s take a different kind where you are focusing on something. So, if you imagine an organization, it has lots of teams but it has two sub-teams, one focusing on innovation, the other focusing on implementation. The team focusing on innovation is going to focus on coming up with ideas, original ideas. What do we know about how the brain works or what is optimal for the brain when this happens?

Well, we know that if you make the brain focus on one single target in front of you, such as a computer screen, your brain state is not going to be optimal to come up with those “aha” ideas because of the temporary structure of the brain at the time. Focusing is not conducive to gentle mind-wandering.

It’s not conducive to letting your attention wander and pick up fragments of data, fragments of thoughts wandering in your head, which you then assemble, or to just waiting for aha moments, for moments of insight to spring up inside your head. That’s one angle to it. So, detaching your attention is important. Not focusing is important.

The second angle to it is there is data that the time of day you work influences how well you work when you’re doing creative work. So creative insights, creative idea generation seems to be better first thing in the day and last thing in the day, not in the middle of the morning, and not in the middle or late in the afternoon. So, in order to really, really optimize idea generation, creative idea generation, perhaps working in a slightly different way for this particular sub-team is going to be more suited for their performance.

Similarly, if you take the second sub-team, which is working on logistics implementation, there they need to zone in, converge on ideas. Now if you are converging on ideas, focusing does help. So, their focused attention is going to be absolutely pivotal. We know focused attention, similar in the opposite way to creativity, focused attention, there seem to be some peak hours for that during the day. The middle morning, middle to late morning is one of them. Immediately after lunch is not one of them and later on in the day is a second slot.

When you’re doing focused attention, when you’re paying focused attention or doing work that involves focused attention, you have to, it helps to sit undisturbed, sit in a very, very attentive state of mind and get that work done. So, if you also think about how your mind is, when you’re creative, your mind is sort of very gently, slowly mind-wandering. When you’re focusing, you want to be sharp, you want to really zone in to what’s in front of you.

These two states of mind are very, very different. So, if you put all of that together, it shows you how you need to be in a certain state of mind that you can tell by looking at how well you focus, how well your mind can, or how easy your attention can wander, a particular time of day is also helpful. And the third thing we haven’t talked about is, as soon as you work continuously, and you measure this as time on task when you measure this aspect in psychological experiments, when your brain works continuously on some kind of intense work, it becomes tired.

When it becomes tired, its information-processing pathways inside your head become inefficient. And when they become inefficient, you can actually measurably or you can visibly see the effect that has on mental output. So rather than coming up with lots of original ideas, you’re much more likely to come up with ideas but they’re not going to be original. So how long you work for is a huge factor here, which is why you also have to put in this 90-minute, 90- or 100-minute ultradian rhythm where you work in slots, and even within those segments of work you pace how you work. That’s a very long answer to your question.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s really beautiful and it matches my own experience in terms of the groove, the flow, the rhythms, the vibe of work. And you talked about the creative and innovative side of things versus the implementation side of things, and sometimes I think of this as creating versus destroying. And I don’t know if it’s just my raw kind of attitude, but it’s like, “I’m going to destroy my inbox,” and by that, I mean I’m going to process it with vigorous speed. We’re going to do a three-second sweep per message, a 20-second sweep per message, and we’re going to watch that baby shrink from 200 to 20 in short order, and that’s good, and that’s kind of fun for me.

But sure enough, that does require that I’m not distracted by other things, and my mind isn’t wandering to interesting, fun things to pursue that’s counterproductive to what I’m after, is shrinking this inbox in a hurry and dispatching messages so people would get what they need from me, etc. Which is totally different than the vibe is like, “Oh, this would be kind of cool if we tried this thing. And here’s a fun idea. And, oh, that sort of connects to this thing I’m hearing on a podcast over there.” And so, those are very different vibes. So, tell me, just to make this contrast all the more crisp and clear for us, do you have a name that you apply to each of these modes of brain operation?

Mithu Storoni
I have. So, in my book, I have created a metaphor, which is very helpful, and I describe the mind as being in three states in the specific context of knowledge work. And these are, I call them three gears: one, two and three. And in a very easy way of imagining them is slow, medium and fast. The mind-wandering state, so the seek and destroy that you just described, which is going through your inbox – I love that analogy, I think it’s a great way of describing it, creating and destroying – that state would be right in the middle of gear two, which is the middle zone.

Gear one – is the kind of state of mind you have when you are really daydreamy. So, maybe the first thing in the morning after you’ve woken up after a deep night’s sleep, you haven’t quite reached that sort of sharpness, you haven’t reached for your coffee yet, you are kind of in a slight daydreamy zone, there’s a sunrise in front of you, you’re sort of halfway, halfway, and your mind feels quite slow. Your attention is floating a lot. You don’t have the ability to make it focus. It’s very, very floaty. You think of thoughts, they come, they go.

Gear two is when you can focus. This is the middle zone. As soon as you reach gear two, you’re able to focus. Within gear two, you have a kind of a slow pace and you have a fast pace. The slow pace gear two is when you can both focus and you can let your attention wander alternately however you want. That is optimal for creativity where you can just detach from what you’re doing, let your attention wander a little bit, but soon as you come up with an idea, with an insight, you can quickly zone your attention spotlight on there, focus on it and bring it to fruition. That is gear two, a slow gear two.

And then you have middle gear two, which is what you described as really intense, powerful focus. And then you have, you leave gear two and you go into gear three. And gear three has, correlates with what is sometimes termed sort of a hyperarousal state. So, in gear three, your thoughts are faster, your actions are faster, but you can’t perform analytical difficult thinking and you cannot focus as well.

So, these are the three gears: gear one is where you just wander; gear three where your mind is very fast and you can’t focus; gear two is right in the middle. And in gear two you can navigate by playing with your attention, detaching it, letting it wander around to go into kind of a light, creative gear two or a really deep focused gear two.

Pete Mockaitis
Now when you say hyperarousal gear three, just to make sure I’m understanding this, I’m thinking about, is this like I’m enraged at a situation? Or what are some of the scenarios or illustrations of hyperarousal?

Mithu Storoni
We are diluting these into single terms, but these are all scales. These all have a range. So, if you look inside the brain, people in a state of hyperarousal, this particular network in the brain is firing very fast, and the faster it fires, the more your physiological arousal increases. But just outside this zone where you can focus, the moment, so let’s just say you’re sitting there, you’re focusing on your email, you’re doing really well, and then a colleague keeps making herself or himself a cup of coffee, and every time they do this, they come and give you one because they’re really kind, and so you inadvertently just keep sipping those espressos while you work, just because they happen to be there.

After one espresso, it’s great, your focus is even better. But after another five, which you don’t realize you’ve had, suddenly, the noise that you heard behind you, the noise of the drilling outside, or the traffic outside, or someone speaking on their phone, suddenly seems really sharp. You couldn’t hear it a minute ago, but after five espressos you suddenly can, and so your threshold for being distracted is suddenly lowered, so you can become easily distracted.

Then, by this time, you haven’t realized you’ve had those five espressos, some more espressos appear and you keep drinking those. And as you drink them, eventually, you reach a point where your focus is completely gone, and you’re simply just reacting to the situation. You’re doing very low-level cognitive stuff, and every sort of small distraction around you is grabbing your attention away.

And as you increase that, you can eventually get into the stage that we do term that falls under the canopy of the banner of rage. But that sort of gear-three state is where you become easily distractible, subtle things become amplified. You become more anxious, more vigilant, so it’s a hyper-vigilant state. And the more, the faster this network fires, the more you go into this state, the more amplified it becomes. So, it’s a scale. This whole thing is a scale. Gear one itself is a scale, gear two is a scale, gear three is a scale, and within those, you’re modulating yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. It’s like we just got one very long continuum. It’s like the entirety of human experience, and we’re segmenting it into three-thirds to make it a little bit more workable to discuss and interact with. So, I guess I’m wondering now, this might be dangerous talking to neuroscience about this, but you mentioned, so we got some choline, some dopamine.

What is the, shall we call them biomarkers, or biochemical things, or heart rate, or brainwave frequency? What’s the stuff going down at our brain-body level within each of these three things in terms of it’s like a little bit in one, a medium amount in two, and a whole lot in three of these fundamental ingredients?

Mithu Storoni
So, very basically, let’s look at norepinephrine. So, norepinephrine, many of you will have heard of it, it’s associated with exercise. We talk about how we’ve got to get that adrenaline pumping or get that norepinephrine. 

And very, very loosely, these three gear states describe or correlate with three ways, patterns of firing of this, of a network in the brain, that is the brain’s headquarter of norepinephrine. So, in a very simple way of saying that, as norepinephrine levels vary in your brain, there’s a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex that sits right behind your forehead. The prefrontal cortex is your brain’s seat for focus, attention, any kind of higher-level cognitive work. Analysis, thinking, remembering, working memory, you name it, the prefrontal cortex is the seat of higher thinking, okay? This entire region of the brain, prefrontal cortex, it’s absolutely pivotal for knowledge work and it becomes very, very active at middle levels of norepinephrine.

So, when you’re in gear two, it’s the Goldilocks zone of norepinephrine that brings your prefrontal cortex completely online. When you have too much norepinephrine, when you enter gear three, your prefrontal cortex goes partly offline, and this is why being in gear two is ideal and essential for focused work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, this is cool, and so I’m curious. So, putting it in these terms, I can see that if you’re in gear one, yeah, that’ll bring you to gear two or gear three, the jumping up and down, the smacking your chest, you’re screaming, “Yes, yes, yes.” That’ll do it. Go for it.

Mithu Storoni
I was just going to say, so I think the three gears are a metaphor of three different mental states. But I would not think of it like a racing car. So, when you’re in gear one, it’s simply a description of a different state. So, when you’re in gear one, and you’re in this kind of slow, mind-wandering state, you can’t focus because you are just not sort of awake enough to focus then. Gear two is when there is more norepinephrine, your prefrontal cortex is engaged, you can focus, you can do high-level cognitive work. And gear three is when there is more norepinephrine, you can think faster, but you can’t do high-level cognitive work because your prefrontal cortex is partly offline. Now, when you’re doing any kind of knowledge work, you’re actually shuttling between these three states, in the sense that, for instance, if you are solving a problem, you have to be mainly in a state of focus, all right?

But as soon as you hit a wall, or your mental slate gets crammed with data, you have to briefly move out of that state into gear one to wipe your slate clean and to refresh the angle that you’re taking. So, if you’ve hit a wall, your brain needs to step back and look at the problem from afar, or from a different angle, that’s when you need to briefly foray into gear one to do that, and then you might see something you were missing, you might feel a little bit more refreshed, then you go back into gear two.

So, although your baseline is gear two, you’re going to keep coming back into gear one every now and again to change your mental state in order to overcome a wall or to just refresh your mind. So, it’s not like you are getting into these fast, high-powered, kind of racing track scenarios. It’s very much a way of your brain is mainly in gear two, but gear one is essential. And that’s why gear one is the mental state you have when you take a break.

So, as an example, if you’re focusing on your inbox, in your email inbox and you’re working through it, every time you close your eyes, your brain immediately goes into gear one for a bit. And then when you open your eyes, you’re back into gear two. What I’m describing here is the baseline you’re in for the majority of time.

The whole thing isn’t a flat line, and that’s how the brain is but the overall general state of the brain when you’re in a mode of focus versus when you’re in a mode of gentle daydreaming are very different, and these are the states I describe with gear one, two, and three.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. So, then I imagine one of the things you want to do in order to accomplish a whole lot of stuff is to just schedule the kinds of activities when things are naturally going to be great for that. If I need to have some brilliant epiphany, aha, eureka moments, well, then let’s schedule some thinking, daydreaming, wandering time in the early morning or late at night, etc. So, there’s kind of working with our schedules and our rhythms and, you know, 90- to 100-minute cycles of stuff. That’s cool. And then, I’m curious, if the situation calls for us to be in a bit of a different gear than we find ourselves in, what do you recommend we do?

Mithu Storoni
So, if I give you a typical day, so just say you are a writer, you are looking for an idea. So, if that’s your job, if that’s your task for the day, what you would do is you’d wake up probably in the morning quite early, and once you’re up in the morning, you would tackle the creative aspect of things there and then. You wouldn’t wait for later in the morning. You’d use the kind of very gentle, relaxed, not quite committed state of mind you have, which would be perfect for that kind of work, that kind of idea generation.

And then once you have your idea, later on in the morning, you’d find you feel a little more alert, you can focus a little bit more and your mind is wandering a lot less. You’re kind of much less in that kind of gentle daydreamy more. There, you sit down, you focus and write or type. And then you continue that pattern as I describe. It changes slightly for the rest of the day.

So, if you’re entering one of those sessions, one of those work sessions, and you’re in the wrong gear, so let’s say you are doing focused work, you’re starting at 9:00 o’clock in the morning, and you are still in that kind of distracted, mind-wandering state of mind. If that’s the case, there are a couple of ways you can use your body’s physiology to make your mind think differently. So, for instance, we know that if you make your body active and alert, your mind becomes active and alert too. Intuitively, you know that to be true.

Physiologically, we know that if you do, for instance, a few sprints before you sit down, when you are feeling a little bit kind of slow and lethargic, that immediately wakes you up. It doesn’t have to be sprints. Any kind of exercise will wake you up. We know that intuitively. And when we say wake you up, it also changes your mental state. You go from feeling lethargic to feeling more alert, much more able to focus.

Conversely, we know that you can also use your body to relax your mind. So, if you are feeling very, very wired, if you’re working in an office where things are very, very, sort of deadlines are very frequent, activity is very fast, everything is very hectic, and you really need to calm down and you need to focus and you need to think about something, in that sort of situation you can use your body, you can use three elements actually, you can use your environment to calm you down.

So, we know that if you bring elements of your environment to be slow, low and soft and dark, your mind also climbs down. So, if you have, for instance, a background music or background sounds which have low frequency beats, sounds which are low pitch, not high pitch, like very slow drum beats or like ocean sounds. There’s a reason why we’re attracted to ocean sounds. So, slow beats, slow rhythms, low frequency, low pitch around you.

So, as an obvious example, if you listen to radio shows or breakfast shows first thing in the morning, people will be speaking very fast at a higher pitch. If you listen to radio shows very late at night, people will be speaking slower with slightly lower pitch, and that is to really match the viewer’s state of mind, but in the morning it’s to really draw the viewer into a more alerting state of mind to wake them up essentially. So, your environment can change in this way.

Colors and intensity of light also have a role to play. There is data that shows that warm, so redder, reddish tones, soft, warm hues are better for creative idea generation, whereas blue light or blue dominant white light, the kind of light you get in the middle of the day or in the middle of the morning even in most latitudes, that’s conducive to being focused and alert. So, if you’re doing a night shift and you really, really need to focus, then using light can help you be in the right state of mind.

So light, sound, your physiology, so muscle. When you contract muscle, you feel more alert, but when you release it, you feel more relaxed. Similarly, when you stretch muscle and release it, you feel more relaxed, and we know that people seek this kind of activity, whether PMR, whether yoga, any sort of stretching-relaxation activity also relaxes the mind.

We also have a third thing, which are breathing exercises, and there is now a lot of data to show that if you breathe at a frequency of around five breaths a minute with long exhalations, and Mara Mather, in California, has done amazing work on this with her team, you can also lower this, the gear, of your mind. So, bring your mind back to an optimal state.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, this is beautiful. So, then I’m thinking then, if we’re in a state where it’s just like, “Ugh, I don’t feel like doing anything,” that’s sort of like the sleepy state, and so more arousal would be helpful if what needs to happen is some smart focused work. And if, likewise, it’s like, “I’m freaking out about this thing,” you know, well, then we want to maybe do with some more of the stretching, the slow breathing, the low lights, etc.

Mithu Storoni
Adjust your environment. Modulate your environment.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now you got me wondering, it’s so funny, I’m thinking about mindfulness meditation stuff, and there are times when it feels so amazingly wonderful, like, “Yes, this is just delightful.” And there are times in which my brain is just furious, which is like, “This is so boring! I can’t stand it!” And so, it seems like, is this kind of the fundamental dynamic at work? Or do you think there are some other dimensions to be considered in this context as well?

Mithu Storoni
So, I’m so happy you brought up the word “boring” because this is really, really important. Now when you’re working on something, when you’re doing knowledge work, you’re working on something, you can, in gear two, you’re in peak focus, you’re engaged, all right? But if what you’re doing is boring, then a little while through, a little while along, 10, 15 minutes, whatever, you suddenly feel your mind wandering and your focus slipping off, slipping away. Not because you’re tired, the work isn’t tiring at all, or let’s imagine the work isn’t tiring at all. You’re just noticing your focus just slip away.

In that sort of scenario, you’re sliding into gear one because you are bored, and there you need more stimulation or a bigger load to get you back into gear two. So, one way is, as you say, you need more stimulation, so maybe change the environment, go to a place that wakes you up. But you can also do it through the work, through the work you’re doing. So, for instance, multitasking gets bad press, but if what you’re doing is boring and you’re sliding into gear one, multitasking can actually keep you in gear two.

Because any form, anything that engages your mind, engages your brain, causes you to put in cognitive effort, will raise you back, will raise your gear. And it’s for the same reason that if you’re working very well, but you have an enormous workload, or you’re getting information you don’t want and you’re being forced to process it while you’re doing the work that you’re doing, you’re having to put in, you’re having to really step on the pedal.

You’re putting in more cognitive effort, and that requires norepinephrine, and there you’re shifting up to gear three to be able to cope. So, actually, you can modulate your gear with the work you are doing. So, if your work is very boring, actually multitasking and doing something in parallel can put you back into the right frame of mind.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And so, I guess I’m wondering if we don’t have the option of changing the thing that we’re doing, maybe we’re in a meeting and we think it’s boring, I suppose, internally, in our own brains we would maybe make up a game. Or what do you recommend there in terms of if it’s like here we are, we’re in a meeting, we’re supposed to be polite, and not whip out our laptops or phones or something? Any pro-tips there?

Mithu Storoni
So, if you’re in a meeting and you just have to attend the meeting, but not contribute or not take anything away from the meeting, then it’s a great opportunity to get into a creative state of mind, be in gear one, let your mind wander, and just use that as a break. So let your mind wander, let your attention wander, try not to dwell on anything, and just use that as a refresher, as a refresher palette for your mind.

If you have to stay awake during a meeting, and simply stay awake and not necessarily contribute, then doing something while you are in that meeting, so solving a problem with pen and paper discreetly while you’re there is another way of dealing with it. So, you add your workload, you increase your cognitive load to stay in the right state of mind.

So, the bottom line of all of this is really that we all function the best. We don’t just work the best when we do knowledge work. We actually function and we feel the best when we’re in this kind of middle speed, is a good way of imagining it, in this kind of middle speed, Goldilocks speed. And in order for the brain to put itself into that middle speed, you need, the brain needs, first of all, some kind of external stimulation, or the external urge to raise its own gear for some other reason.

So, for instance, if it’s receiving a lot of load the brain is going to work harder to cope with it. If cognitive load is very low, it’s going to get very bored and slip out of gear two. So, if that happens, then you can bring in extra cognitive load or bring in extra stimulation to keep the brain in this middle zone. Your mind, your brain is really an information-processing machine, and its optimal pace of processing that information is gear two. So, you need to give it enough information to keep it there. And if you swing over, if you overshoot, you end up in gear three.

So, if you’re going down from gear three to gear two, another way to look at it is you’re going down from gear three to gear two, then reduce the number of tasks you’re doing, reduce the difficulty of the task you’re doing, remove time pressure, remove uncertainty, and then adjust your environment to make it lower, slower, slower-paced, and then, of course, you can add in these physiological buttons through your muscle relaxation, through your autonomic nervous system.

So, ultimately, your brain, your mind is most efficient when it’s moving ahead at this middle speed of processing information. And the key, the art of being able to navigate yourself and stay in that zone while you’re doing knowledge work is a secret to hyper-efficiency because when you’re in that zone, the kind of work you’ll be doing will be the best you can do.

You can still do a lot of work while you’re bored. You can also do a lot of work while you’re in gear three. You can type hundreds of emails. You can even type them faster. But you won’t be able to solve a difficult differential equation in gear three, or plan a killer chess move in gear three. You’ll be able to play chess, but you’ll probably lose in the first 15 moves.

Pete Mockaitis
Thirty-second bullet games.

Mithu Storoni
Exactly. Exactly. In gear one, you’re not engaged enough to think, to analyze either. But in gear two, in this middle zone, when your brain is just awake enough, alert enough, but not too wired, that’s when it processes information the fastest, and hence, it does it in the best possible way.

Pete Mockaitis
You said the word “refresh” earlier, and I’m curious, if we’re doing these 90- to 100-minute bouts, a break is just necessary. Do you have any suggestions on what is a supremely, or hyper-efficient, or excellent means of breaking to restore our brains’ capacity and capabilities quickly?

Mithu Storoni
Yes. So, when you’re thinking of a break, just to give you a little bit of background, we now know through some very elegant forms of brain imaging that when you’re doing intense mental work, something that requires you to pay attention, something like solving math equations, as your brain cells work, they produce byproducts because they have little factories in them, they need energy to work, they break, they use ATP. They produce byproducts.

And as you’re working, these byproducts accumulate and then they get cleaned away. Now there is some evidence, and I mention where this data comes from, in the book, that one reason for fatigue may well be that the rate at which you’re producing these toxic byproducts is faster than your ability to clear them away. And so, when you take a break and you stop the intensity of work, you’re immediately giving your mind, your brain an opportunity to recover. So that’s a bottom line.

Now how should that break be? So, in this context, think of the difference between the brain and muscle. So, if you’re lifting weights in a gym, the moment you stop lifting weights, your muscle relaxes. So, when you stop working your muscle, your muscle rests. But when your mind is working on its office chair, as soon as you move from the office chair and you even go and sit on a beach, your mind has not moved one inch. It carries on working. There is no stop switch on your mind.

And so, the kind of break you take has to be tailored to the state of mind you are in when you were working. So, if your work was just very, very tiring, it wasn’t in any way emotionally draining, emotionally triggering, just very, very tiring, and as soon as you stop, imagine you’re having to read a hundred boring emails that don’t really mean anything, but they’re just, your eyes are glazing over, that sort of state. If that’s the case, then as soon as you take a break, as soon as you stop what you’re doing, your mind will be able to relax.

So, in that sort of scenario, you can break and just do nothing. Just relax, you don’t have to do anything actively. But if your work was, or is, in a situation where you have a lot of emotional tension, you have a deadline you’re working for, you have a problem you really can’t solve you’re still struggling with, the moment your break approaches, you’re very likely to be what I call tired and wired, which means you are tired, you’re physically tired, you’re mentally tired, but your mind is still trying to process that information, so it has stepped on the accelerator, taking you right up to gear three to work through and your gear just won’t slide back.

And, intuitively, your listeners and you will realize what this is because it’s the kind of feeling you have at the end of a day when you’ve just really pushed yourself to keep working beyond when you were tired by having coffee, by carrying on. And so, by the time you get home, you can’t really switch off. You feel tired, but your mind is still buzzing. That’s what I describe as tired and wired.

If that’s the case, and you’re taking a break in the middle of the day, and you’re feeling like that, then for the first few moments of your break, it’s much more helpful to do something really absorbing that distracts you completely from the work you are working on. So, play a game on your phone. Something like Tetris has been shown to be very effective in this sort of context, other games like Tetris. Play a game on your phone or watch a video, watch something immersive, until you momentarily forget the work you were just doing. As soon as you do, stop and then you relax.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, first, we get into the forget zone and then we stop and relax. Is there any way to relax better or should we just chill?

Mithu Storoni
So, if you are in that forget zone, you can relax. I mentioned two kinds of breaks in the book. So, I mentioned a break at the end of 90 minutes when you just need to refuel. I also mentioned a type of break, which I call a kind of a reset break, and this is the kind of break you would take within your work segment. So, if you’re doing a 90-minute block of work and your work is really intense, you would probably need to pause for a little while every 20 minutes or so, if your work is really, really intense.

Or if your work is really, really boring, you will be forced to just kind of take a step back every 20 minutes or so and just be like, “Okay, I need to kind of wire my mind back up to cope with this.” When you’re taking a break in that context, what you’re trying to do during the break is put your mind back into gear one.

So, as an example, imagine you are just watching paint dry, okay, you’re doing some kind of work, which is really, really boring. Your mind, you’re in the right zone when you started that work. But about 10 minutes, 15 minutes into the work, your attention just floats away. You cannot bring it back and everything just gets very slow, lethargic. At that point, take a quick five-minute break and do something to bring you back into that zone. So that can be something physical. Physical is usually the easiest.

So, at that point, doing a quick bout of exercise will put you back in the best kind of mental zone where you can go back to doing that work focusing. So, an applicable real-world scenario of this is anything that requires you to keep monitoring something. So, monitoring a camera, monitoring other machines working, monitoring a system. Every 20 minutes or so, your attention is going to float, melt away, and there you take a very quick break to actually not relax you but to actually excite you back into the right mental zone.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Well, Mithu, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Mithu Storoni
Certainly. So, another aspect of work today, as well as these three gears, is the idea of how everything we’ve always used to motivate us in the past are changing because the whole map of knowledge work is drastically changing at the moment. We are having to retrain, we’re having to reskill, we’re having to learn on the job, so there’s a huge amount of change taking place, and so this is a really great time to bring in the idea that has long been known as intrinsic motivation, and kind of repackage it and rework it for our era.

Because right now, we are working and living at a time where your job might not be guaranteed, the goal that you’re working towards might change tomorrow, a new LLM might come about tomorrow, a new version of the existing one might come about tomorrow, and everything you’ve been learning suddenly becomes obsolete the next day.

So, in this sort of landscape, you have to work with a different kind of motivation. So, we have to learn and we have to tailor and curate our jobs. Managers should be curating workflows, workloads, to generate as much as much of this intrinsic motivation as possible. And one way that seems to be a pretty powerful way of deriving it in any context, and intrinsic motivation is notoriously difficult to create, is by this phenomenon called learning progress.

It’s called learning progress mechanism. And one of the researchers behind Pierre-Yves Oudeyer from Paris, who is working with artificial agents, and his team has found how, whenever you’re working, you’re doing any kind of work, it’s really, really important to have physically kind of something that you can really physically, tangibly feel, obvious progress.

So, you have to be making rapid progress in something towards a goal and improving through skill or knowledge yourself in some way as fast as you can, as regularly and as solidly as you can, while you work. If you can engineer an element of this into one what you’re doing, you will have sufficient intrinsic motivation in your work, and that is going to be key in the workplace moving forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly, that rings true. That gets me fired up, no doubt. Well said. Now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mithu Storoni
What I would say is my book was really heavily influenced by the work of Marshall McLuhan, who looked at technology and the effect it is having on our brains. One of the quotes that I really love, is that we have had a way of working all this time, where we’ve really been working like a marching soldier. We’ve been moving forward in regular steps in order. We need to change, and we need to now add flair to the way we work because that will help us get into these unique brain states and produce our best.

And he describes that as a transition from a marching soldier to working, spinning like a dancing ballerina. And that is really a metaphor for how our work needs to change in this new AI-assisted age of the knowledge age.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Mithu Storoni
So, The Medium is the Message is a great book that really gives you a wonderful overview of technology.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Mithu Storoni
So, I have a website, my name, www.MithuStoroni.com. I’m on LinkedIn, Mithu Storoni. I’m also on Twitter/X as @MithuStoroni.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Mithu Storoni
Tomorrow, whatever your routine is, just think about this conversation and tailor your day completely differently, adjust it to your routine, and then give us a feedback the day after as to how it went.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, Mithu, this is fun. I wish you much hyper-efficiency.

Mithu Storoni
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.